Friday Ramble - Just a Little Green

Zen teacher and chef Dana Veldon thinks a simple bowl of lemons can offer us the world, and she always keeps one on the counter in her kitchen. Since I read her book (Finding Yourself in the Kitchen) years ago, I have done it too. She is right - the little dears are life-changing. I love the look of them when light comes through the kitchen window and falls across them, their colour and shape, their texture and fragrance. They lift my spirits, and their citrusy goodness makes me smile.

Having a pot of parsley is also a fine way of invoking the right stuff in one's kitchen before spring and summer really get going, and I do that too. The smell of the stuff is uplifting, refreshing and bright and just a little grassy. When I discovered a bin in my green grocer's shop a few days ago, I grabbed a lovely bunch and blithely pitched it in my cart. The cherry tomatoes purchased on the same expedition were not too shabby either. Both were tossed into a wok with other odds and ends from the fridge and served on leftover rice for dinner that night. A banquet. Yum.

No doubt about it, lemons and parsley light up a kitchen, and as sure as the Old Wild Mother made little green apples, they cheer me up on a bleak morning. They turn my impromptu stirrings into happy magics, and that is what life is all about.

Thursday Poem - Bio

I am a leaf-dance in the woods.
I am the green gaze of the ocean.
I am a cloud-splitter in the sky.
I arrived robed in red
out of nowhere and nothing.
I whisper between pages.
I disappear in the painting.
I rest between musical notes.
I awaken among strangers
in a country I never imagined.
I am timbales and bells,
a parade under your window.
I am the riddle I cannot solve,
hands on the clock's face,
seven crows on a branch.
I am the one whose footfall
changes the pattern of stars.

Dolores Stewart, from The Nature of Things

(reprinted here with the late poet's kind permission)

Wordless Wednesday - First Mourning Cloak

Little Blue

On an overcast morning in late April, I am bending over a cluster of blooming Siberian squill (Scilla siberica) in a corner of the garden, training my camera on them and trying not to go base over apex (ass over tea kettle) among the emerging daylilies nearby. It's the same old game as in countless other seasons. While trying to stay upright and capture images, I am also trying to be attentive to spring's wonders in all their natural wabi sabi grace, their suchness. It's a Zen thing.

Then there is the matter of patience. I must wait for the wind to pause in its madcap dance before clicking my shutter. Sometimes the exercises turn out, but more often I am rewarded by blurring, flickering and dancing coins of bokeh.

Spring is a time of brightness and radiant becoming. This is the seventh springtime without my soulmate, and it was his favorite season of the year - he loved the tiny wildflowers lifting their heads in the woods and fields and fens now. The ache of losing that beautiful man never goes away. On our morning rambles, Beau and I think of him as tucked in one of our pockets and enjoying the unfolding splendor of the great wide world with us. We send him our love, every single day.

Sequestered, 350 (CCCL)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Turn off the lights. Go outside. Close the door behind you.

Maybe rain has fallen all evening, and the moon, when it emerges between the clouds, glows on the flooded streets and silhouettes leafless maple trees lining the curb. Maybe the tide is low under the docks and warehouses, and the air is briny with kelp. Maybe cold air is sinking off the mountain, following the river wall into town, bringing smells of snow and damp pines. Starlings roost in a row on the rim of the supermarket, their wet backs blinking red and yellow as neon lights flash behind them. In the gutter, the same lights redden small pressure waves that build and break against crescents of fallen leaves.

Let the reliable rhythms of the moon and tides reassure you. Let the smells return memories of other streets and times. Let the reflecting light magnify your perception. Let the rhythm of rushing water flood your spirit. Walk and walk until your heart is full. Then you will remember why you try so hard to protect this beloved world, and why you must.

Kathleen Dean Moore, from Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril

Everything's Coming Up Maple

Friday Ramble - Bloom

Foliage popping out everywhere, avian courtship rites and nests cobbled together in every tree - the village is greening up before our eyes as Beau and I potter about and peer into gardens and hedgerows. Spring does not make a quiet entrance this far north - she comes over the hill with an exuberant bound, reaches out with a twiggy hand, and everything bursts into bloom. On a recent morning walk, the first crocus of the season was blooming in a protected alcove, and we both did a little dance. We were drenched by a squall on the way home and didn't mind at all.

How can this week's word be anything except bloom? The word originates in the Middle English blo or blome, meaning to open up and flower lavishly, to glow with health and well-being, to be as sleek and glossy as an otter, as dewy and flushed with sunlight as a garden tulip or an early blooming orchid in a wild and wooded place. There are probable connections (or roots) between bloom and bhel in Proto-Indo-European, the hypothetical common ancestor of all modern European languages, In that ancient, oral and unscribed tongue, bhel means to unfold, to leaf out or come into flower.

Perhaps a better word for this week would be sex, because that is what springtime's lush colors, alluring fragrances, velvet textures and warbling ballads are about - the Old Wild Mother's madcap dance of exuberance, fertility and fruitfulness. Every species on the planet seems focused on perpetuating its own heady genetic brew, and the collective pleasure in being alive is almost tangible.

Forsaking appointed chores, we poke around in the garden, lurch about in village thickets, peer into trees and contemplate the blue sky for long intervals. It's simply a matter of blooming wherever one happens to be planted. Beau is already a master of that splendid Zen art, and his silly old mum is working on it.

Thursday Poem - Swiftly

Swiftly the years, beyond recall,
Solemn the stillness of this fair morning.
I will clothe myself in spring clothing,
And visit the slopes of the Eastern Hill.
By the mountain stream a mist hovers,
Hovers a moment, then scatters.
There comes a wind blowing from the south
That brushes the fields of new corn.

T'ao Ch'ien (translation by Arthur Waley)

We are still several weeks away from seeing new corn, but for me, these eight lines are the essence of April and springtime.

Wordless Wednesday - Willowy

Spring in a Jar

It will be a week or two until the "daffies" in the park are up and blooming, but I could not resist bringing home a gorgeous bouquet of heirloom specimens from a tin pail near the entrance of a village market a few days ago.

Everyone nearing the place stopped to look at the narcissi on display, most of us heading home with a generous bunch clutched in our paws along with our coffee beans, artisanal cheese and freshly baked croissants. Gotta love weekends!

Daffodils are the essence of springtime, and my blooms have a delicate, sweet fragrance with just a hint of spice. Lovingly arranged in a jar in the dining room, their velvety white petals and glowing centers make my heart glad. 

Sequestered, 349 (CCCXLIX)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

By telling the holy, we acknowledge that life is a gift. In fact, the whole universe is a gift. From where or what, and why, we cannot know. All we do know is that it issues forth, moment by moment, eon by eon, ever fresh, astounding in its richness and beauty. None of this is to gainsay the pain, the suffering, the eventual death that awaits all created things. But we measure that pain and suffering, we mourn that death against the sheer exuberant flow of things.

Scott Russell Sanders

Reaching for the Light

Friday Ramble - Radical

This week's word is radical, a natural choice for this madcap season when greenery is popping up all over the place, and we are thinking about planting flowers, veggies and herbs in our gardens. It comes to us through the late Latin rādīcālis meaning "originating in the ground", and the Old English wrotan meaning to root, gnaw or dig up. Both spring from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) wrad meaning branch or root. Having said all that, it will not be safe to seed, plant or root anything this far north until the end of May. We had snow earlier this week, lucky us.

Synonyms include: fundamental, basic, basal, bottom, cardinal, constitutional, deep-seated, essential, foundational, inherent, innate, intrinsic, native, natural, organic, original, primal, primary, primitive, profound, thoroughgoing, underlying, vital. They also include pejorative words such as anarchistic, chaotic, extremist, fanatical, lawless, militant, rabid, rebellious, revolutionary, and seditious.

Those of us who live a little differently are sometimes called "radical". Ditto those who live outside the mainstream or "off the grid", who don't follow accepted social standards and tend to do their own thing rather than just placidly following the herd like a bunch of sheep. In the sixties, being called "radical" was mostly a compliment, but these days it is often pejorative.

How odd that a word used to describe the unconventional, independent, mildly eccentric and downright peculiar actually means something as lovely, organic and simple as "rooted". Do I consider myself radical? Anyone who writes, sketches, takes heaps of bad photos, rambles in the woods in all sorts of weather and talks to trees is a tad peculiar, so I suppose I am.

Our word signifies a bone deep kinship with everything that matters in this dear little blue world. It's about the good dark earth under our feet and the sky over our heads, the sun and the moon and the stars. It's about rebirth, belonging, community and non-duality. Roots down, branches up and away we go...

Thursday Poem - The Greatest Spendor

Some say it’s in the reptilian dance
of the purple-tongued sand goanna,
for there the magnificent translation
of tenacity into bone and grace occurs.

And some declare it to be an expansive
desert—solid rust-orange rock
like dusk captured on earth in stone
simply for the perfect contrast it provides
to the blue-grey ridge of rain
in the distant hills.

Some claim the harmonics of shifting
electron rings to be most rare and some
the complex motion of seven sandpipers
bisecting the arcs and pitches
of come and retreat over the mounting
hayfield.

Others, for grandeur, choose the terror
of lightning peals on prairies or the tall
collapsing cathedrals of stormy seas,
because there they feel dwarfed
and appropriately helpless; others select
the serenity of that ceiling/cellar
of stars they see at night on placid lakes,
because there they feel assured
and universally magnanimous.

But it is the dark emptiness contained
in every next moment that seems to me
the most singularly glorious gift,
that void which one is free to fill
with processions of men bearing burning
cedar knots or with parades of blue horses,
belled and ribboned and stepping sideways,
with tumbling white-faced mimes or companies
of black-robed choristers; to fill simply
with hammered silver teapots or kiln-dried
crockery, tangerine and almond custards,
polonaises, polkas, whittling sticks, wailing
walls; that space large enough to hold all
invented blasphemies and pieties, 10,000
definitions of god and more, never fully
filled, never.

Pattiann Rogers, from Firekeepers

Wordless Wednesday - Emergence

Reaching for the Light

Wood squill (Scilla siberica)

One day, there were piles of snow in the yard at least three feet deep, and I could not get anywhere near the garden shed for white stuff and sneaky patches of ice. The next day, the snow was receding into the good dark earth, and tiny flowers were springing up everywhere, reaching for the light over their nodding, fragile heads. 

Grasses thrust themselves out of puddles in the park, and a few ducks paddled up and down the little creek among the trees. Everywhere, there was birdsong, each and every feathered singer in the overstory declaring its delight in the season.

We could hardly believe our good fortune, and every sunbeam, new leaf and tiny bloom was a gift. If we had stopped to look at everything we encountered, we would never have gotten anywhere at all. I was able to get the shed door open and greet my gardening tools. Was spring here at last? If so, not for long.

If I had not written this idiotically cheerful post, we probably would not have gotten snow overnight, and now it is snowing again. I never learn, or rather unlearn.

Sequestered, 348 (CCCXLVIII)

 

Happy Easter

Self Portrait With Wind and Rain

Friday Ramble - Atomy

This week's word comes to us from the Middle English attome, the Latin atomus and the Greek atomos: a- (not) plus -tomos (divided), tomos hailing from the Indo-European temnein meaning to cut. Kindred words (of course) are atom, atomism and atomic, epitome and (not so obviously), tome which now refers to a book or a volume of reading material but once meant simply something cut or carved from a larger entity. Synonyms include corpuscle, mote, particle, speck, molecule and grain, as in "a grain of sand" or "a grain of sugar".

An atomy is a tiny part of something, a minute particle. Scientists once thought atoms were the smallest units of the known physical universe: dense, central, positively charged nuclei circled by electrons whirling around in ecstatic orbit. Complete within themselves, they were thought to be irreducible and indivisible except for constrained processes of removal or transfer or the exchange of component electrons.

Physicists now think the much smaller quark is the fundamental element of creation. Named after a word coined by James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake, quarks come in six eccentric flavors: up, down, charm, strange, bottom and top. Up and down quarks are the most common, coming together to form composite particles like the protons and neutrons in the heart of atoms. Surprise, surprise, everything happens in threes, and three is my favourite number. A proton is composed of two up quarks and one down quark, a neutron one up quark and two down quarks. Other quarks (charm/strange, top/bottom) have no function in the universe as we know it, but they played an important role as it was coming into being. These other quarks become up and down quarks as they decay and take their rightful place within atoms.

Atomies come to mind when I awaken, as I have this morning, to leaden skies and rain on the roof beating staccato time without reference to meter or metronome, to a puckish wind capering in the eaves and ruffling tiny green leaves and buds in the garden like tangy decks of playing cards, to drifting fog wrapping the old trees, rooflines and chimneys in the village.

Every raindrop (or dewdrop) out in the garden this morning is an atomy, a minute complete world teeming with vibrant life. Within each is a whole magical universe looking up and smiling at this ungainly creature bent over in wonder with a camera in her hand. Either that or the little dears are recoiling in dismay. I won't ever get a handle on using my macro lens to its full potential, but its loving eye is teaching me how to look at the world in new ways, and that is a fine thing to be sure.

Thursday Poem - An April Night

The moon comes up o'er the deeps of the woods,
And the long, low dingles that hide in the hills,
Where the ancient beeches are moist with buds
Over the pools and the whimpering rills;

And with her the mists, like dryads that creep
From their oaks, or the spirits of pine-hid springs,
Who hold, while the eyes of the world are asleep,
With the wind on the hills their gay revellings.

Down on the marshlands with flicker and glow
Wanders Will-o'-the-Wisp through the night,
Seeking for witch-gold lost long ago
By the glimmer of goblin lantern-light.

The night is a sorceress, dusk-eyed and dear,
Akin to all eerie and elfin things,
Who weaves about us in meadow and mere
The spell of a hundred vanished Springs.

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Wordless Wednesday - Early Morning Rain

Spring Makes An Appearance

Skies are cloudy, and a gentle rain is falling outside the windows. Beau and I are doing tea and listening to raindrops hitting the roof of the garden shed in a fine staccato rhythm, to the last clumps of snow falling off the peaked rooflines of nearby houses. The watery motifs of two seasons are rolled into one this soggy morning.

Mr. B. does not care much for wet weather, and he is curled up in a corner of the sofa, grumbling. He does, however, appreciate a fine puddle, and there are lagoons in the village deep enough and wide enough for him to swim around in circles. That will cheer him up immensely when we go out for a walk later.

A murmuration of starlings is hanging out in the cedar hedge, and the wily birds are pretending they are something else entirely, cardinals, robins, house finches, song sparrows. What is wrong with just being a starling? A few robins are back, and they have been visiting the garden this week. At sunrise, one was perched high in the ash in the corner, singing his (or her) pleasure in the day and calling for more rain.

Perhaps it is time for a new wreath on the front door, something with sprigs of pussy willow, tulips or eggs (fake of course) in pastel colours. Rain or no, a graceful nod to the season and a small ritual gesture of some sort are called for. 

Perhaps I can finally lug the heavy tub of ice melter in from the veranda? On second thought, I think I will wait for a week or two. 

Sequestered, 347 (CCCXLVII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment. 

Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Returning, Little By Little

Friday Ramble - Homecoming

First come jubilant skeins of of geese flying in from the south and singing their return, then ducks splashing about in the melted alcoves of local rivers and streams. There is a whole lot of happy quacking in roadside ditches and puddles.

A single heron perches on the frozen shore of Dalhousie Lake and wonders why on earth she has come home so early in the season. Trumpeter swans and loons will not return for weeks, until there is more open water.

On the Two Hundred Acre Wood, there are larks and killdeer, beaky snipe and woodcock, a handful of plucky robins, the graceful "v" shapes (dihedrals) of turkey vultures soaring majestically over the trees and rocks and rocking effortlessly back and forth in their flight. From below, the light catches their silvery flight feathers and dark wing linings, and the great birds are as magnificent as any eagle.

A solitary goshawk perches in a bare tree on the hill, and a male harrier describes perfect, languid circles over the western field. Both birds are hungry after their long journey north, and they train their fierce yellow eyes on the artfully frosted field below, always on the lookout for a good meal.

This morning, a male cardinal is singing his heart out in the ash tree in the garden, and an unidentified warbler lifts its voice somewhere in the darkness.

Even the weather foretold for this day will be a friend.

Thursday Poem - Return

Through the weeks of deep snow

we walked above the ground

on fallen sky, as though we did

not come of root and leaf, as though

we had only air and weather

for our difficult home

But now

as March warms, and the rivulets

run like birdsong on the slopes,

and the branches of light sing in the hills,

slowly we return to earth.

Wendell Berry